Paint Your House These Colors To Sell It For More Money

Over the last 10 years, I've moved around so much that it's become a pipe dream to live somewhere long enough to paint the walls — I've come to consider interior paint as a sign of stability. As it turns out, it's actually a bigger deal than I thought — a new study by Zillow Digs shows what to paint your house to get more money for it on the market. Because, yes, that's a thing.

Color-painted walls register not just to residents as a sign of comfort, but to buyers as a sign of taste which elicits similar feelings. When considering a home, potential buyers gravitate towards painted rooms. A nice coat of colored paint on a wall fires off all sorts of connections in the brain. It tells the potential buyer that the people who lived there cared for the house, that it's in good shape and worthy of decorating. It says "welcome" and "stay a while".

In the study carried out by the real estate company, they found that there were significant patterns in purchase prices of homes that had interior colored walls. Kitchens that were painted yellow, bedrooms that were painted green, dining rooms that were painted purple and living rooms that were painted grey, all sold over $1,000 over their market's price. In comparison, kitchens that were white, dining rooms that were grey, and bathrooms that were brown priced between approximately $100 to $1,000 under the market value. So I think it's safe to say that we prefer cheery colors to basic or muted colors — those give off a different and less than homey vibe.

While the vast difference between prices might seem surprising, the effect that colors have on our mentality is an age old concept called chromotherapy. Our feelings are directly influenced by the colors we surround ourself with. According to chromotherapist Sophia Hansen, MA, of Harvard University:

"Color Therapy has been around for thousands of years. In Atlantis there were many great healing temples with large rooms and domes made of colored crystals that had color infuse the entire room when the sunlight shined through them. These temples healed physical, mental and emotional illnesses. People were treated with different colors depending on their condition. Every color has its own unique healing prescription. There are records of cures with color therapy in ancient Egypt - from about 1550 B.C. These Egyptian healing temples also used color therapy to cure the ills of the time. In ancient Greece Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle developed some of the early theories about light and color. Ancient Greece also had healing temples that used color therapy with colored light and gemstones. Interestingly, the ancient Chinese up until modern times diagnosed illness by the color of the pulse. For example, a yellow pulse, indicates health."

Which is maybe why yellow kitchens are selling so much! According to the same philosophy, rooms that are painted with the absence of color such as white or black, might make buyers feel unmoved. While neutral colors like beige and brown tend to have lower energies and be less likely to excite or calm someone.

So whether you're selling your house or looking to make the one you live in more appealing to your psyche, you might want to consider yellows, greens, blues and purples.